The connecting of a user to a remote system using an application component is well-known and readily appreciated by those of skill in the art. Conventionally, a user may use a browser to communicate a request to a web server. The web server will take that request and communicate it to an application server which includes a predetermined or limited number of threads available for handling requests. The application server will allocate a thread to the request and then have the application component take that request and attempt to retrieve it from the remote system. However, as the number of available threads on the application server may be limited, the application server typically may only be able to handle predetermined number of requests before the requests are queued. In the event the remote system experiences an outage when there are a large number of requests, users may end up waiting a significant amount of time to find out that the remote system has experienced an outage, which can result in a diminished user experience. Furthermore, the allocation of threads and the queuing of requests to an unavailable remote system ties up resources which could be used more efficiently.
A conventional solution for this problem is the use of connection pooling, which involves the establishment of a pool of database connections between the application server and the remote system which can be shared by application components on the application server. This limits the creation of new connections because existing connections from the pool of database connections may be used, which saves resources. However, when the remote system goes down, the diminished user experience associated with the amount of time a user waits to find out that the remote system has experienced an outage remains.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a system and method for outage avoidance absent the disadvantages found in the prior methods discussed above.